Sierra Nevada Ovila Quad

Summer 2011 - Highlight of my visit to Falling Rock in Denver. Highlight of the afternoon, wandering around Denver. Highlight of a week filled with lots of beer adventures. Maybe even the highlight of a summer that witnessed me and my friend traveling the span of Colorado in search of good beer. The Sierra Nevada Ovila Quad is a masterpiece, and I had the pleasure of making out with it in the stylish basement of the Falling Rock tap house. Beer drinking might get better than this, (Cantillon in a Belgian field at sunset?) but I think I’ve come close. It was too dark to ogle the color, so I went straight to inhale the perfume coming off the beer. I’m sure I looked like a geriatric patient clutching at an air mask, but it felt like I had broken through smog and got to inhale my first breath of fresh sequoia forest. Blood orange, red grapes, strawberries, gentle prods of cocoa, a rounded edge of malt, and the kind of Belgian yeast aroma that inspired so much of the craft beer revolution. The flavor follows in suit, featuring A light orange citrus zest, and underneath that there is champagne, more of those sweet, desiccated red grapes, Palisade peach, deep cherry notes and even an apple crispness that might be cousin to the champagne flavors I already noted. I also detect smaller but no less appreciable flavors of golden raisins and vanilla beans in the nose, only after the beer has had some time to warm up to its environs. Similarly, with a little warmth the beer provides some lovely brown sugar notes, opening up the spectrum of dark sweets in further. This beer is, frankly, a masterpiece, and deserves all the credit its earned. I don’t know who brought more to the table - Sierra Nevada or their Belgian, theist counterparts - but this tastes something like a work of a higher being. Bravo!